


To Love, Madly

by tea_petty



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Angst, F/M, Immortality, Reincarnation, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:43:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24030763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_petty/pseuds/tea_petty
Summary: They say only a mad man tries the same thing over and over again, and expects different results.
Relationships: America (Hetalia)/Reader
Kudos: 38





	To Love, Madly

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr; tea-pettiest

Someone once said, to be mad is to do the same thing and expect different results. 

Okay, so he might be paraphrasing, but someone, somewhere, at some point, said something like that. Alfred was fairly certain.

-

The first time he saw her, she was wearing a light-yellow gown that was so gauzy and frilly it looked like it might dissolve in a light summer rain, like spun sugar. Her entrance in the room had caught his attention – and at the perfect time too; the Governor was about to make another long-winded speech, and quite honestly, if he had to hear Franklin talk any longer he might throw himself off the balcony. 

She’d appeared to float across the floor and Alfred watched as she nodded and deflected several gentleman’s attempts at conversation. 

She’d had a glass of wine in one delicate looking hand – the perfect reason not to dance with anyone. He hoped this was true, he thought and a lopsided grin made its way onto his face. He didn’t know why, but it amused him.

Alfred strongly suspected that might’ve been her plan as the drivel of voices died down and the swell of music started. He immediately ducked away from his boss, weaving through the bodies as the first of the dancing started up. 

He watched the last of her generous skirts trail out the balcony door, and followed. 

Outside the night was crisp. He wondered if she was cold, for even he felt the nip in the air.

Her back was facing him, all the better to display the elegant twists her hair was coiled in. Beyond her was a backdrop of so many stars, it looked like he could sweep his fingers through it and emerge with a handful of them, like if one swept their hand through the sandy banks of a riverbed. 

“Can you feel that?” he asked.

She did not turn at the sound of his voice, but it was no matter; he was already joining her at the railing.

“I do,” she said, “I’ll bet we’ll get rain before the morn’.”

He had actually been planning on making some tacky comment about liberty, but when he turned to look at her, her eyes were sharp, and her lips were pressed in an amused way that made him feel like she’d already known what he was going to say.

“That’d be most favorable.”

“Oh?” 

“Uh, I think, for crops and such matters,” he said, a little lamely. 

Then, she’d laughed, and it had been the beginning of the end.

They’d wandered off for a walk around the Governor’s estate; by this time she had caught his name, and he, hers. Several glasses of port had been consumed. The heat of inebriation fended off the bite in the air, all the while stoking more tender, secretive fires that they tended too in the grounds’ stable.

He had kissed her first there, removed her handkerchief to catch a glimpse of what she looked like when she fought for breath under him, one hand careful to keep her skirts hitched at her waist, and the other cupping her jaw as he kissed fervently at her skin. 

He remembered her telling him that he’d been her first – and he remembered no other victory that glowed so gold in his life.

Sometimes, on brisk, Autumn evenings, Alfred could lay in bed, and visit the night again in his dreams. He wondered if she saw him in her dreams too – a handsome stranger that left an unfamiliar, lingering melancholy with her as daylight magicked his image away.

Shortly after their tryst in 1787, she passed from measles.

-

He hadn’t had to wait too long until the next time he saw her, though much had changed.

She’d been wearing a yellow dress again – and it was probably the only reason he’d been brave enough to follow her through the crowded streets, ducking between the merchants pushing their wares and the horses pulling their carts.

He was surprised he’d been able to pick her face out in the crowd – but it had been just as radiant in the Tuesday afternoon sun as it had been in the Autumn moonlight.

He’d followed her all the way to the docks, which were less busy – which was how she’d caught onto the fact that he’d been following her.

She’d spun on her heel, hands on her hips (though she had to wait for her skirts to follow in suit.) Her eyes had flashed, and Alfred was taken back to the star-freckled skies of their first meeting, her eyes shining like port in crystal.

“I beg your pardon,” she’d said, sounding angry.

Alfred had only known to give a little bow; a sign of respect for the lady he so desperately cherished. He couldn’t bite back the stupid smile in his face, though he knew she might scream or hit him if he didn’t find a way to come across as less unnerving, soon.

“Miss – I mean no offense. I just-“

“What business do you have with me?” she demanded.

Alfred, despite having been dreaming of their reconciliation for the past thirty years, could think of nothing to say to her now.

He stared dumbly at him, and if his eyes hadn’t shone so well, if his smile hadn’t taken the breath from her lungs, she might not have waited for him to manage a:

“Weather,” he blurted. “Do you think it might rain soon?”

She made a face that had Alfred humoring the notion of grabbing her and kissing her right there.

“There’s not a cloud in the sky. Are you thick?”

She was as sharp as he remembered. When he asked her name, that was the same too. He felt his heart swell so, that he thought it might burst from his chest. He’d welcome it too, for he knew it meant that he indeed had found her again. 

Arthur had explained to him after the Davie incident, that such things sometimes happened with humans – though he’d warned him that it was dangerous to rely on such a thing. He'd seen it once before with Francis and had no desire to see it on one he once called 'brother' as well.

Like it had the first time though, the warning slipped through his ears without any traction.

“Yeah,” he laughed, and scratched the back of his head. He felt his face warm. “Maybe a little.”

She studied him for a few moments, and then looked as if she were suppressing a grin herself.

“Hm. Well, at least you’re honest.”

He bowed again, this time over-exaggerated.

“Might you accompany an honest man for the afternoon?”

“I’m actually supposed to be meeting my father – but, I’m off to a…soiree of sorts later this eve if you’d like to meet again there.”

He quickly recovered from the disappointment that had first made his face fall. 

“I would, most truly, like to meet you again.”

He did. Long after the sun had set, at a grand homestead. She’d told him to dress lightly; and she had, hoping for a repeat of their first meeting. 

The night was a blur of tangled limbs and many faces; though the only one he remembered was hers. As it turned out, what was supposed to be a dinner party had had an extra special assortment of dessert. 

There had been a lot of naked bodies in the room that night, though Alfred had clung to her as much as possible; a lock of hair twisted around his finger, her lips on him, his arms around her. 

At the end of the night, he’d hoped to accompany her further, but she had to return home to her husband and kids.

He would not see her again for another hundred years.

-

Money had never been tighter for him, and every day seemed like a losing fight to keep his people employed, and more importantly, fed.

After fifty years without seeing her again, he’d stopped looking – and he was a little bit upset from the whole husband revelation, he couldn’t lie. 

He was completely floored when he bumped into her on the gray streets of Boston in 1929. 

She’d seemed happier than he remembered, and even though their last encounter still hung over him, like an anvil pressed to the inside of his skull, he couldn’t help but be relieved that her face hadn’t been lost to time. 

He asked for her name again, and again, it was the same. He was shamefully euphoric.

For a few hours, he was able to push his financial woes from his head, and they took a walk. She had linked her arm through his, and where he felt her body heat permeate through her (again, yellow) dress, he felt himself catch fire.

She was light as air, and her smile was infectious. Soon enough, Alfred felt a bit more like himself. She was witty – though not quite as resentful as her ancestors had been. She was funny, earnestly so, and he nearly doubled over when she confided him about the scandalous thing her friend Mary had done with her husband.

“I could never put my mouth there,” she confided, and her gaze was so serious that Alfred couldn’t help but laugh again. If only he could tell her what she’d done with it in centuries past.

“What, not even for your husband?”

She snorted, “I’d never marry a man who asked for that.”

“So your husband would never?”

“I’m not married.”

His heart sang.

For decades the thought of pushing her skirts up and feeling her thighs around him haunted him. Now, he was perfectly content with her arm in his. At the end of their afternoon, when she’d pecked a kiss at his cheek, he felt like he could’ve walked on air.

-

It was just his luck.

He’d had to wait nearly another century until he saw her again, and who was she but a journalist for the UN.

From the very first meeting she attended, he’d caught her eye, and she, his. The attraction they had together was tangible; evident enough for Francis to tease him about it during breaks, palpable enough that Ludwig had pulled him aside to remind him of the sort of messiness that could arise from sleeping with someone within the United Nations.

Still though; he’d been pining for this woman for almost 250 years. 

A stern warning from Ludwig and the no-fraternization policy wasn’t even close to being enough to stop him.

During a break, they’d find an empty room.

When he kissed her, all he could think of was how the red of her lipstick reminded him of rouge, and how they tasted exactly the same. When he pulled her shirt off, all he could think of was how that it was the same shade of yellow. The same.

When she held onto him, thighs wrapped around his waist as he thrust into her wet heat, he could barely keep the words inside of him.

Don’t leave me again. 

But this was the modern era – people simply didn’t say things like that, especially not to a quick fuck in an empty conference room. Sometimes, when his eyes shut, and as she called his name, he would pay extra attention to how she grasped onto him, and with the sting of her nails in his skin, he’d pretend like they were assurances she was planting in him; this time it’s permanent. I’m sorry for keeping you waiting.

Sometimes he’d have to bury his face into the crook of her shoulder, where only her scent could ward away the deep-set melancholy.

There was a time where he felt her hands trail fire down his back, before grasping at his ass. He groaned.

“Ah – “ she’d moan, “talk to me,” she’d beg, bouncing in his arms, and all the more desirable as she peeked up at him through her lashes.

Through his vicious thrusts, he’d find it in him to press a kiss to her forehead. When her eyelashes fluttered shut and she held him nearer, he could’ve come then and there.

He wanted to tell her – I can find you in any crowd, I choose you, always. Time was a bitch, but he’d found her again and again, and he’d do it as many times as he had to. 

The words were at the tip of his tongue.

She gasped as he thrust particularly deep.

“Alfie, I-“

He clutched her closer, and then she buried her face in his chest and whispered something. He muffled the words, crumpling them into nothing he could find meaning in. No!

“What’s that?”

“I-“

Then the door opened up, and terrible light filtered in. They froze, and she yelped.

Standing in the doorway was Arthur.

“Oh for fuck’s sake Alfred.”

Irritation flared in Alfred, mingling with the arousal still stewing at his groin. He leaned in and wrapped his arms around her. She was ducking her head against him, and he tried best he could to shield her from Arthur’s eyes – though he’d since reached up to clamp a hand over them anyways.

“Artie – give us five minutes. We’re finishing up.”

Arthur sighed.

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Bloody fuck.”

At the relent in Arthur’s voice, Alfred wilted a little. He’d told him a little bit about her. Who else would’ve drunk with him, while Alfred was slumped over the bar, face buried in his hands as he drank so much his hands shook in the months to follow. Alfred did it for him, after all, almost every other time.

Unlike the other nations, Arthur was the only one who knew about Alfred’s secret – the only one who could attest to what Alfred referred to as his ‘soul mate’ theory. 

Sure, Alfred was irritated, but he also knew Arthur understood. 

When the door shut, he thrust again into her, and she whimpered.

“Fuck – that was so embarrassing.”

Alfred wanted more than anything to ask her what she’d meant, but as always, the moment passed. And like always, he knew it would come again, if only he were patient.

“Yeah,” he said, and his hips slapped against hers.


End file.
